A quick recap about the context: in NiFi, unless you specifically do something to make the nodes of a NiFi cluster exchange data, a flow file will remain on the same node from the beginning to the end of the workflow. For some use cases, it is necessary to load-balance the flow files among the nodes of the cluster to take advantage of all the nodes (like the List/Fetch pattern).

The only way to load balance data in a NiFi cluster before NiFi 1.8 is to use the Site-to-Site (S2S) protocol in NiFi with a Remote Process Group (RPG) connected to the cluster itself with an input/output port. In addition to that the S2S forces you to have the input/output port defined at the root level of the canvas. In a multi-tenant environment this can be a bit annoying and can make the workflows a little bit more complex.

What’s the revolution with NiFi 1.8+? For intra-cluster load balancing of the flow files, you now can do it directly by configuring it on the relationship between two processors. It could sound like a minor thing, but that’s HUGE! In addition to that, you have few options to configure the load-balancing which opens up new possibilities for new use cases!

The List/Fetch pattern is described in my previous post: in short… it’s the action to use a first processor (ListX) only running on the primary node to list the available data on X and generate one flow file per object to retrieve on X (the flow file does not have any content but contains the metadata to be used to fetch the object), then flow files are distributed among the NiFi nodes and then the FetchX processor running on all nodes will take care of actually retrieving the data. This way you ensure there is no concurrent access to the same object and you distribute the work in your cluster.

List/Fetch pattern before NiFi 1.8.0

If we have a project A retrieving data from a FTP server using the List/Fetch pattern to push the data into HDFS, it’d look like this:

Root Process Group level

Inside the Process Group dedicated to Project A

The ListFTP is running on the primary node and sends the data to the RPG which load balances the flow files among the nodes. Flow files are pushed to the input port at the root level and the data can then be moved back down to the process group of the project. Then the FetchFTP actually retrieves the data and the data is sent to HDFS.

List/Fetch pattern with NiFi 1.8+

Now… it looks like this:

Root Process Group level

Inside the Process Group dedicated to Project A

It’s crazy, no? You don’t have anything outside of the process group anymore, the workflow is cleaner/simpler, and authorizations are much easier to manage.

Where is the trick? Did you notice the small icon on the relationship between the ListFTP and the FetchFTP? It looks small but it’s HUGE :).

Load balancing strategies in NiFi 1.8+

Let’s have a look at the configuration of a connection:

There is a new parameter available: the load balance strategy. By default it defaults to “do not load balance” and, unless you need to, you won’t change that parameter (you don’t want to move data between your nodes at each step of the workflow if there is no reason to do so).

Here are the available strategies:

The Round robin strategy is the one you would probably use in a List/Fetch use case. It will ensure your data is evenly balanced between your nodes.

The Single node strategy allows you to send the data back to one single node. You can see it a bit like a reducer in a MapReduce job: you process the data on all the nodes and then you want to perform a step on a single node. One example could be: I have a zip file containing hundreds of files, I unzip the file on one node, load balance all the flow files (using Round Robin strategy for example) among the nodes, process the files on all the nodes and then send back the flow files to a single node to compress back the data into a single file. It could look like this:

Then you have the Partition by attribute strategy allowing you to have all the flow files sharing the same value for an attribute to be sent on the same node. For example, let’s say you receive data on NiFi behind a load balancer, you might want to have all the data coming from a given group of sources on the same node.

Let’s just give it a try with each strategy… I’m using a GenerateFlowFile (GFF) connected to an UpdateAttribute and we will list the flow files queuing in the relationship to check where the flow files are located. Besides, the GenerateFlowFile is configured to set a random integer between 2 and 4 for the attribute ‘filename’.

Let’s start with a GFF running on the primary node only with no load balancing strategy:

Let’s change the Load Balance strategy to Round Robin. We can confirm the data is evenly distributed:

Let’s change the strategy to One single node. We can confirm the data is now back to a single node (not necessarily the primary node):

And now let’s try the partitioning by attribute using the ‘filename’ attribute. We can confirm that all the flow files sharing the same value in the Filename column are on the same node:

Again, I expect to see additional blog posts on this subject with more technical insights on how it actually works and what you should consider in case your cluster is scaling up and down.

Also… this new feature comes with another one which is as much exciting: the offloading of nodes in a cluster (look at the Admin guide in the documentation). In case you want to decommission a node in a cluster, this will take care of getting back the data on the other nodes before you actually remove the node for good. This will be particularly useful when deploying NiFi on Kubernetes and scaling up and down your cluster!

With the release of Apache NiFi 1.4.0, quite a lot of new features are available. One of it is the improved management of the users and groups. Until this release, it was possible to configure a LDAP (or Active Directory) server but it was only used during the authentication process. Once authenticated it was necessary to have explicit policies for this user to access NiFi resources. And to create a policy for a given user, it was first necessary to manually create this user in NiFi users/groups management view. This time is now over. Users/groups management is now greatly simplified in terms of lifecycle management.

In addition to that, if you are using Apache Ranger as the external authorizer system for NiFi, you can now define rules based on LDAP groups. Before, you had to configure, in Ranger, rules explicitly based on users.

In this article, we are going to discuss how this is actually working and how you can configure it.

Basically, the authorizer mechanism evolved quite a bit. Before NiFi 1.4, the authorizers.xml was containing a list of configurations for any authorizer implementation you wanted to use to manage policies in NiFi. Unless you developed your own implementations, you had the choice between the FileAuthorizer (default implementation that stores the policies in a local file) and the RangerNiFiAuthorizer to user Apache Ranger as the external mechanism managing the policies.

If using the FileAuthorizer, the configuration was looking like (in a single node installation):

Starting with NiFi 1.4, the authorizers.xml file provides much more functionalities (note that the changes are backward compatible and do not require any change from your side if you don’t want to change it).

Let’s start by the new implementation of the authorizer: the Standard Managed Authorizer.

Note – there is also a new Managed Ranger Authorizer, but I won’t go into the details of this implementation in this blog. This implementation gives you the possibility to use Apache Ranger as the external system managing the authorizations but you still have access to the policies in the NiFi UI, and you can also manage additional users. It’s also this implementation that allows you to define group-based policies in Ranger.

This new implementation expects the identifier of the Access Policy Provider implementation you want to use. This new abstraction will be used to access and manage users, groups and policies… and to enforce policies when dealing with requesting access to NiFi resources. In the above example, our authorizer is identified with name “managed-authorizer”, and that’s what you need to set in nifi.properties to user it:

nifi.security.user.authorizer=managed-authorizer

You can see that this authorizer expects a property Access Policy Provider with the identifier of the provider you want to use… Let’s move on to the Access Policy Provider. For now, there is a single implementation which is the FileAccessPolicyProvider. If you already know about the previous FileAuthorizer, you shouldn’t be very surprised by the expected properties. Here is a configuration example:

Note: as you can see the identifier of this Access Policy Provider is “file-access-policy-provider”, and that’s what we referenced in the property of the authorizer (see above).

As with the FileAuthorizer, you have the Initial Admin Identity property which lets you configure the identity of the user with the admin permissions to set the first policies after a fresh install of NiFi. As the documentation says:

Initial Admin Identity – The identity of an initial admin user that will be granted access to the UI and given the ability to create additional users, groups, and policies. The value of this property could be a DN when using certificates or LDAP, or a Kerberos principal. This property will only be used when there are no other policies defined. If this property is specified then a Legacy Authorized Users File cannot be specified.

NOTE: Any identity mapping rules specified in nifi.properties will also be applied to the initial admin identity, so the value should be the unmapped identity. This identity must be found in the configured User Group Provider.

Then you still have the Legacy Authorized Users File property in case you are upgrading from a NiFi 0.x install and you want to keep your previous policies in place.

You have the Authorizations File property that defines the path to the file that will locally store all the policies. You also find the Node Identity properties in case you are in a NiFi cluster. Nothing changed on this side, but just in case, a quick reminder from the official documentation:

Node Identity [unique key] – The identity of a NiFi cluster node. When clustered, a property for each node should be defined, so that every node knows about every other node. If not clustered these properties can be ignored. The name of each property must be unique, for example for a three nodes cluster: “Node Identity A”, “Node Identity B”, “Node Identity C” or “Node Identity 1”, “Node Identity 2”, “Node Identity 3”.

NOTE: Any identity mapping rules specified in nifi.properties will also be applied to the node identities, so the values should be the unmapped identities (i.e. full DN from a certificate). This identity must be found in the configured User Group Provider.

OK… now we have a new property called “User Group Provider” and that’s where we’re going to specify the identifier of the User Group Provider to be used. This User Group Provider is a new abstraction allowing you to define how users and groups should be automatically retrieved to then define policies on them.

You have multiple implementations available:

CompositeUserGroupProvider

CompositeConfigurableUserGroupProvider

LdapUserGroupProvider

FileUserGroupProvider

As the name suggests, the CompositeUserGroupProvider implementation allows you to use at the same time multiple implementations of the User Group Provider. This is very useful, mainly because when using NiFi in clustering mode, you need to define some policies for the nodes belonging to the cluster. And, as you may know, in NiFi, nodes are considered as users. In case your nodes are not defined in your LDAP or Active Directory, you will certainly want to use the composite implementation.

Now you need to consider the CompositeConfigurableUserGroupProvider implementation which is the one you will certainly want to use in most cases. This implementation will also provide support for retrieving users and groups from multiple sources. But the huge difference is that this implementation expects a single configurable user group provider. It means that users and groups from the configurable user group provider are configurable from the UI (as you did when creating users/groups from NiFi UI in previous versions). However, users/groups loaded from one of the other User Group Providers will not be.

Note that it’s up to each User Group provider implementation to define if it is configurable or not. For instance, the LDAP User Group Provider is not configurable: NiFi is not going to manage users and groups in the LDAP/AD server.

A typical configuration will be the definition of the Composite Configurable User Group provider with the File User Group provider as the configurable instance and one instance of the LDAP User Group provider:

Now, let’s look at the File User Group provider. The objective of this provider is to provide the same functionalities as before: the user can manage users and groups from the UI and everything is stored locally in a file. Configuration looks like:

The initial user identities are users that should automatically populated when creating the users.xml file for the first time. Typically you would define here your initial admin identity (if this user is not defined via the LDAP user group provider). From the documentation:

You can find the usual parameters that you configured for the LDAP authentication part, but there is also a lot of new parameters to only synchronized specific parts of your remote LDAP/AD servers. The documentation says:

‘User Identity Attribute’ – Attribute to use to extract user identity (i.e. cn). Optional. If not set, the entire DN is used.

‘User Group Name Attribute’ – Attribute to use to define group membership (i.e. memberof). Optional. If not set group membership will not be calculated through the users. Will rely on group membership being defined through ‘Group Member Attribute’ if set. The value of this property is the name of the attribute in the user ldap entry that associates them with a group. The value of that user attribute could be a dn or group name for instance. What value is expected is configured in the ‘User Group Name Attribute – Referenced Group Attribute’.

‘User Group Name Attribute – Referenced Group Attribute’ – If blank, the value of the attribute defined in ‘User Group Name Attribute’ is expected to be the full dn of the group. If not blank, this property will define the attribute of the group ldap entry that the value of the attribute defined in ‘User Group Name Attribute’ is referencing (i.e. name). Use of this property requires that ‘Group Search Base’ is also configured.

‘Group Name Attribute’ – Attribute to use to extract group name (i.e. cn). Optional. If not set, the entire DN is used.

‘Group Member Attribute’ – Attribute to use to define group membership (i.e. member). Optional. If not set group membership will not be calculated through the groups. Will rely on group membership being defined through ‘User Group Name Attribute’ if set. The value of this property is the name of the attribute in the group ldap entry that associates them with a user. The value of that group attribute could be a dn or memberUid for instance. What value is expected is configured in the ‘Group Member Attribute – Referenced User Attribute’. (i.e. member: cn=User 1,ou=users,o=nifi vs. memberUid: user1)

‘Group Member Attribute – Referenced User Attribute’ – If blank, the value of the attribute defined in ‘Group Member Attribute’ is expected to be the full dn of the user. If not blank, this property will define the attribute of the user ldap entry that the value of the attribute defined in ‘Group Member Attribute’ is referencing (i.e. uid). Use of this property requires that ‘User Search Base’ is also configured. (i.e. member: cn=User 1,ou=users,o=nifi vs. memberUid: user1)

NOTE: Any identity mapping rules specified in nifi.properties will also be applied to the user identities. Group names are not mapped.

If I have to summarize a bit the new authorizers.xml file structure, I could use this image:

Now we discussed the technical details. Let’s demo it. I’ll re-use Apache Directory Studio to setup a local LDAP server as I did in my article about LDAP authentication with NiFi. I’ll skip the details (please refer to the article if needed) and create the following structure:

In a group, I have:

And for a user, I have:

Note that I’m using a very bad hack because, by default, the attribute ‘memberOf’ is not available unless you define additional objectClass. As a workaround, I’m using the ‘title’ attribute to represent the membership of a user to different groups. It’s quick and dirty, but it’ll do for this demo.

In this case, I decide to go through the users defined in my ‘people’ OU, to filter only the users belonging to the ‘nifi’ group and to use the ‘cn’ attribute as the username. I also specify that the ‘title’ attribute is the group membership of a user. This way, NiFi is able to do the mapping between the users and groups. Note that my ‘admin’ user that I defined as my initial admin identity is in my LDAP server, and I don’t need to define it in the File User Group provider definition.

When starting NiFi and connecting to it as the ‘admin’ user, I can go in the Users view and I can find:

Note that the button to add users and groups is available since I used the Composite Configurable User Group provider and defined the File User Group provider. That’s how I would specify my nodes as users if I don’t want to have the servers in my LDAP/AD.

Also note that this will automatically be synchronized with LDAP/AD based on the “Sync Interval” you specified in the authorizers configuration file.

Finally, as mentioned in the docs, remember that the order is important when using composite providers in case you have users/groups collisions between multiple sources.

With this configuration, I don’t have to care anymore about defining users and groups in NiFi and I can directly create my policies. It’s much more efficient to manage everything in case people are leaving, or changing of projects. Cool, isn’t it?

Note – if you’re using NiFi 1.8+, this post is no longer up to date. It is useful to understand how NiFi works but things have changed a bit.Have a look here.

I do see a lot of questions about how is working the List[X]/Fetch[X] processors and how to load balance the data over the nodes of a NiFi cluster once the data is already in the cluster. Since the question comes up quite often, let’s discuss the subject and let’s try to understand how things are working here.

I will assume that you are running a NiFi cluster since there is no problem about data balancing with a standalone instance 😉

The first thing to understand is: when running a cluster, one of the node is randomly designated as the “Primary node”. The election takes place when the cluster starts, and there is no way to decide which node will be the primary node. OK… you could force things when your cluster starts but there is no point to do such a thing if you want real high availability. So short line is: all nodes may have to be the Primary node at one point and don’t assume that the Primary node will be a given node in particular.

Second thing to understand is: the flow that you are designing on your canvas is running on all the nodes independently. Each node of the cluster is responsible of its own data and a relationship between two processors does not mean that the data going into this relationship will be balanced over the nodes. Unless you use a Remote Process Group (see below) the data will remain on the same node from the beginning to the end of the flow.

I will use a the following example to illustrate my explanations: I want to get files from a remote SFTP server and put the files into HDFS.

First idea (bad idea!) / GetSFTP -> PutHDFS

The first option could be the pattern Get/Put which is perfectly fine with a standalone instance. However this will cause issues if you have a NiFi cluster. Remember? The flow is running on all hosts of your cluster. Problem is that you will have concurrent accesses from your nodes to the same files on the SFTP server… and if the processor is configured to delete the file once retrieved (default behavior) you will have errors showing up. Conclusion: always have in mind that a processor is running on all the nodes and can cause concurrent access errors depending on the remote system.

Second idea (not efficient!) / GetSFTP on Primary Node -> PutHDFS

The second option is to configure the GetSFTP processor to only run on the Primary Node (in the Scheduling tab of the processor configuration):

This way, you will solve the concurrent accesses since only one node of your cluster (the Primary node) will run the GetSFTP processor.

Brief aside: remember, the flow is running on all the nodes, however if the processor is configured to run on the primary node only, the processor won’t be scheduled on nodes not being the primary node. That’s all.

With this approach the problem is that it’s not efficient at all. First reason is that you get data from only one node (this does not scale at all), and, in the end, only the primary node of your cluster is actually handling the data. Why? Because, unless you explicitly use a remote process group, the data will remain on the same node from the beginning to the end. In this case, only the primary node will actually get data from SFTP server and push it into HDFS.

To solve the issues, the List/Fetch pattern has been developed and widely used for a lot of processors. The idea is the following: the List processor will only list the data to retrieve on the remote system and get the associated metadata (it will not get the data itself). For each listed item, a flow file (with no content) will be generated and attributes will be populated with the metadata. Then the flow file is sent to the Fetch processor to actually retrieved the data from the remote system based on the metadata (it can be the path of the file on the remote system for example). Since each flow file contains the metadata of a specific item on the remote system, you won’t have concurrent accesses even if you have multiple Fetch processors running in parallel.

Obviously the List processor is meant to be run on the Primary node only. Then you have to balance the generated flow files over the nodes so that the Fetch processor on each node is dealing with flow files. For this purpose you have to use a Remote Process Group.

A Remote Process Group is an abstract object used to connect two NiFi setup together (the communication between the two NiFi is what we call Site-to-Site or S2S). It can be a MiNiFi instance to a NiFi cluster, a NiFi cluster to another NiFi cluster, a NiFi standalone to a NiFi cluster, etc. And it can also be used to connect a NiFi cluster to itself! This way the flow files will be balanced over all the nodes of the cluster. Few things to know with a Remote Process Group:

You need to have an input port on the remote instance you are connecting to (in our case, you need a remote input port on your canvas).

The address you give when configuring your remote process group does not matter in terms of high availability: once the connection is established with one of the nodes of the remote instance, the remote process group will be aware of all the nodes of the remote instance and will manage the case where the node specified in the address goes down.

# Site to Site properties
nifi.remote.input.host=
nifi.remote.input.secure=
nifi.remote.input.socket.port=
nifi.remote.input.http.enabled=
nifi.remote.input.http.transaction.ttl=

In the case of our SFTP example, it looks like:

Let’s try to understand what is going on from a cluster perspective. Here is what we have in the case of a 3-nodes NiFi cluster with ListSFTP running on the primary node only:

The ListSFTP when scheduled is going to list the three files on my remote SFTP server and will generate one flow file for each remote file. Each flow file won’t have any content but will have attributes with metadata of the remote files. In the case of ListSFTP, I’ll have (check the documentation at the “Write attributes” paragraph):

Name

Description

sftp.remote.host

The hostname of the SFTP Server

sftp.remote.port

The port that was connected to on the SFTP Server

sftp.listing.user

The username of the user that performed the SFTP Listing

file.owner

The numeric owner id of the source file

file.group

The numeric group id of the source file

file.permissions

The read/write/execute permissions of the source file

file.lastModifiedTime

The timestamp of when the file in the filesystem waslast modified as ‘yyyy-MM-dd’T’HH:mm:ssZ’

filename

The name of the file on the SFTP Server

path

The fully qualified name of the directory on the SFTP Server from which the file was pulled

The ListSFTP processor will generate 3 flow files and, for now, all flow files are only on the primary node:

Now the Remote Process Group has been configured to connect to the cluster itself, and I set the relationship going from ListSFTP to the Remote Process Group to connect with the input port I created (you may have multiple input ports in the remote system to connect with and you can choose the input port to connect to, that’s up to your needs). When the RPG (Remote Process Group) has the communication enabled, the RPG is aware of the three nodes and will balance the data to each remote node (be aware that there is a lot of parameters for Site-to-Site to improve efficiency). In my case that would give something like:

Note: that would be an ideal case in terms of balancing but, for efficiency purpose, the Site-to-Site mechanism might send batch of flow files to the remote node. In the above example, with only 3 flow files, I would probably not end up with one flow file per node.

Now, since we have everything in the attributes of our flow files, we need to use the Expression Language to set the properties of the FetchSFTP processor to use the attributes of the incoming flow files:

This way, each instance of the FetchSFTP processor will take care of its own file (to actually fetch the content of the remote data) and there won’t be any concurrent access:

All your nodes are retrieving data and you really can scale up your cluster depending on your requirements. Note also that the PutHDFS won’t be an issue neither since each node will write its own file.

As I said previously a lot of processors are embracing this pattern (and this is recommended way to use such processors with a NiFi cluster), and I’d strongly encourage you to do the same when developing your custom processors.

Apache NiFi 1.1.0 is now out, and I want to discuss a specific subject in a couple of posts: how to scale up and down a NiFi cluster without loosing data? Before going into this subject, I want to setup a 3-nodes secured cluster using the NiFi toolkit. It will be my starting point to scale up my cluster with an additional node, and then scale down my cluster.

There are already great posts describing how to setup a secured cluster using embedded ZK and taking advantage of the NiFi toolkit for the certificates, so I won’t go in too much details. For reference, here are some great articles I recommend:

On my OS X laptop, I will use the NiFi TLS toolkit in server mode so that it acts as a Certificate Authority that can be used by clients to get Certificates.

Here is the description of how to use the TLS toolkit in server mode:

./bin/tls-toolkit.sh server
usage: org.apache.nifi.toolkit.tls.TlsToolkitMain [-a <arg>] [-c <arg>] [--configJsonIn <arg>] [-d <arg>] [-D <arg>] [-f <arg>] [-F] [-g] [-h] [-k <arg>] [-p
<arg>] [-s <arg>] [-T <arg>] [-t <arg>]
Acts as a Certificate Authority that can be used by clients to get Certificates
-a,--keyAlgorithm <arg> Algorithm to use for generated keys. (default: RSA)
-c,--certificateAuthorityHostname <arg> Hostname of NiFi Certificate Authority (default: localhost)
--configJsonIn <arg> The place to read configuration info from (defaults to the value of configJson), implies useConfigJson if set.
(default: configJson value)
-d,--days <arg> Number of days issued certificate should be valid for. (default: 1095)
-D,--dn <arg> The dn to use for the CA certificate (default: CN=YOUR_CA_HOSTNAME,OU=NIFI)
-f,--configJson <arg> The place to write configuration info (default: config.json)
-F,--useConfigJson Flag specifying that all configuration is read from configJson to facilitate automated use (otherwise configJson will
only be written to.
-g,--differentKeyAndKeystorePasswords Use different generated password for the key and the keyStore.
-h,--help Print help and exit.
-k,--keySize <arg> Number of bits for generated keys. (default: 2048)
-p,--PORT <arg> The port for the Certificate Authority to listen on (default: 8443)
-s,--signingAlgorithm <arg> Algorithm to use for signing certificates. (default: SHA256WITHRSA)
-T,--keyStoreType <arg> The type of keyStores to generate. (default: jks)
-t,--token <arg> The token to use to prevent MITM (required and must be same as one used by clients)

In my case, I run the TLS toolkit on my node-3, and I run the following command:

Don’t forget the -T option to get your client certificate in a format that is easy to import in your browser (PKCS12). This command also generates a nifi-cert.pem file that corresponds to the CA certificate, you will need to import it in your browser as well (and you might need to manually update the trust level on this certificate to ensure you have access to the UI).

At this point I’m able to fill the authorizers.xml file. I need to specify myself as initial admin identity (to access the UI with full administration rights), and specify each nodes of my cluster (using the DN provided with the generated certificates). It gives:

WARNING – Please be careful when updating this file because identities are case-sensitive and blank-sensitive. For example, even though I specified

-D "CN=pvillard,OU=NIFI"

when executing the command to generate the certificates, it introduced a white space after the comma. The correct string to use in the configuration file is given in the output of the TLS toolkit when executing the command.

Once I’ve updated this file on each node, I’m now ready to start each node of the cluster.

./bin/nifi.sh start && tail -f ./logs/nifi-app.log

Once all nodes are correctly started, I am now able to access the NiFi UI using any of the nodes in the cluster:

NiFi UI / 3-nodes secured cluster

That’s all! Next post will use the current environment as a starting point to demonstrate how to scale up/down a NiFi cluster.

As you may know a version 1.0.0-BETA of Apache NiFi has been released few days ago. The upcoming 1.0.0 release will be a great moment for the community as it it will mark a lot of work over the last few months with many new features being added.

The objective of the Beta release is to give people a chance to try this new version and to give a feedback before the official major release which will come shortly. If you want to preview this new version with a completely new look, you can download the binaries here, unzip it, and run it (‘./bin/nifi.sh start‘ or ‘./bin/run-nifi.bat‘ for Windows), then you just have to access http://localhost:8080/nifi/.

The objective of this post is to briefly explain how to setup an unsecured NiFi cluster with this new version (a post for setting up a secured cluster will come shortly with explanations on how to use a new tool that will be shipped with NiFi to ease the installation of a secured cluster).

One really important change with this new version is the new paradigm around cluster installation. From the NiFi documentation, we can read:

Starting with the NiFi 1.0 release, NiFi employs a Zero-Master Clustering paradigm. Each of the nodes in a NiFi cluster performs the same tasks on the data but each operates on a different set of data. Apache ZooKeeper elects one of the nodes as the Cluster Coordinator, and failover is handled automatically by ZooKeeper. All cluster nodes report heartbeat and status information to the Cluster Coordinator. The Cluster Coordinator is responsible for disconnecting and connecting nodes. As a DataFlow manager, you can interact with the NiFi cluster through the UI of any node in the cluster. Any change you make is replicated to all nodes in the cluster, allowing for multiple entry points to the cluster.

OK, let’s start with the installation. As you may know it is greatly recommended to use an odd number of ZooKeeper instances with at least 3 nodes (to maintain a majority also called quorum). NiFi comes with an embedded instance of ZooKeeper, but you are free to use an existing cluster of ZooKeeper instances if you want. In this article, we will use the embedded ZooKeeper option.

I will use my computer as the first instance. I also launched two virtual machines (with a minimal Centos 7). All my 3 instances are able to communicate to each other on requested ports. On each machine, I configure my /etc/hosts file with:

192.168.1.17 node-3192.168.56.101 node-2192.168.56.102 node-1

I deploy the binaries file on my three instances and unzip it. I now have a NiFi directory on each one of my nodes.

The first thing is to configure the list of the ZK (ZooKeeper) instances in the configuration file ‘./conf/zookeeper.properties‘. Since our three NiFi instances will run the embedded ZK instance, I just have to complete the file with the following properties:

Then, everything happens in the ‘./conf/nifi.properties‘. First, I specify that NiFi must run an embedded ZK instance, with the following property:

nifi.state.management.embedded.zookeeper.start=true

I also specify the ZK connect string:

nifi.zookeeper.connect.string=node-1:2181,node-2:2181,node-3:2181

As you can notice, the ./conf/zookeeper.properties file has a property named dataDir. By default, this value is set to ./state/zookeeper. If more than one NiFi node is running an embedded ZK, it is important to tell the server which one it is.

To do that, you need to create a file name myid and placing it in ZK’s data directory. The content of this file should be the index of the server as previously specify by the server. property.

On node-1, I’ll do:

mkdir ./state
mkdir ./state/zookeeper
echo 1 > ./state/zookeeper/myid

The same operation needs to be done on each node (don’t forget to change the ID).

If you don’t do this, you may see the following kind of exceptions in the logs:

Again, I set the FQDN of the node I am configuring and I choose the arbitrary 9998 port for the Site-to-Site (S2S) exchanges between the nodes of my cluster. The same applies for all the nodes (just change the host property with the correct FQDN).

It is also important to set the FQDN for the web server property, otherwise we may get strange behaviors with all nodes identified as ‘localhost’ in the UI. Consequently, for each node, set the following property with the correct FQDN:

nifi.web.http.host=node-1

And that’s all! Easy, isn’t it?

OK, let’s start our nodes and let’s tail the logs to see what’s going on there!

./bin/nifi.sh start && tail -f ./logs/nifi-app.log

If you look at the logs, you should see that one of the node gets elected as the cluster coordinator and then you should see heartbeats created by the three nodes and sent to the cluster coordinator every 5 seconds.

You can connect to the UI using the node you want (you can have multiple users connected to different nodes, modifications will be applied on each node). Let’s go to:

As you can see in the top-left corner, there are 3 nodes in our cluster. Besides, if we go in the menu (button in the top-right corner) and select the cluster page, we have details on our three nodes:

We see that my node-2 has been elected as cluster coordinator, and that my node-3 is my primary node. This distinction is important because some processors must run on a unique node (for data consistency) and in this case we will want it to run “On primary node” (example below).

We can display details on a specific node (“information” icon on the left):

OK, let’s add a processor like GetTwitter. Since the flow will run on all nodes (with balanced data between the nodes), this processor must run on a unique processor if we don’t want to duplicate data. Then, in the scheduling strategy, we will choose the strategy “On primary node”. This way, we don’t duplicate data, and if the primary node changes (because my node dies or gets disconnected), we won’t loose data, the workflow will still be executed.

Then I can connect my processor to a PutFile processor to save the tweets in JSON by setting a local directory (/tmp/twitter):

If I run this flow, all my JSON tweets will be stored on the primary node, the data won’t be balanced. To balance the data, I need to use a RPG (Remote Process Group), the RPG will connect to the coordinator to evaluate the load of each node and balance the data over the nodes. It gives us the following flow:

I have added an input port called “RPG”, then I have added a Remote Process Group that I connected to ” http://node-2:8080/nifi ” and I enabled transmission so that the Remote Process Group was aware of the existing input ports on my cluster. Then in the Remote Process Group configuration, I enabled the RPG input port. I then connected my GetTwitter to the Remote Process Group and selected the RPG input port. Finally, I connected my RPG input port to my PutFile processor.

When running the flow, I now have balanced data all over my nodes (I can check in the local directory ‘/tmp/twitter‘ on each node).

That’s all for this post. I hope you enjoyed it and that it will be helpful for you if setting up a NiFi cluster. All comments/remarks are very welcomed and I kindly encourage you to download Apache NiFi, to try it and to give a feedback to the community if you have any.